The secretary-general of the Independent Doctors’ Union, Nuno Rodrigues, hopes that the new government will restore the 15% salary increase for doctors by 2026, completing the interim agreement reached with the previous executive.
“Despite last year’s interim agreement [with the previous government], since 2015 doctors have still not reached purchasing power parity and therefore a salary increase is still necessary,” Nuno Rodrigues told Lusa.
In his first interview since being elected to the post at the age of 41 on March 23rd at the SIM National Congress, the public health doctor said that the union had agreed with the previous Socialist government that this increase would be made in one legislature, which would end in 2026.
“So we hope that by 2026, what we asked of the previous government will be no less than what we’re going to ask of this government (…) to achieve the valuation that’s missing,” he said, stressing: “We’ve already achieved 15% and so we’re missing the 15% that we promised our members to achieve with the government.
Before the political crisis that led to the fall of the government, the joint proposal of SIM and the National Federation of Doctors (FNAM) was to obtain a 30% increase in doctors’ salaries during the legislature (2022 to 2026), a reduction to 35 hours of work, and a reduction in the weekly emergency period from 18 to 12 hours.
The need for these measures to be phased in had already been accepted between the government, the FNAM and the SIM, which considered the interim agreement reached to be the first stage of this phasing.
Asked if the SIM will return to the negotiating table together with the FNAM, Nuno Rodrigues said “the table has always been joint”, it’s the strategies and proposals that “have been different”.
“Regardless of that, the Independent Doctors’ Union is always available to negotiate. What we’re not going to do is become a union that protests for the sake of protesting,” he stressed.
He added: “We are constructive, we want the good of the SNS, the health of the Portuguese and we think that the best way to achieve this is by giving doctors better conditions, so we are willing to collaborate and we will certainly talk to the next government and the other union structure.”
Asked if negotiations with the unions are not resumed quickly, Nuno Rodrigues replied: “Doctors are thoughtful and moderate people, they can’t always be waiting for a tomorrow that never comes”.
“And so the doctors are available to negotiate calmly, with a view to the future, with pleasure, always with a view to construction and not destruction or protest per se,” he said, adding: “What the doctors don’t want is to go on strike (…) protest for protest’s sake.”
According to Nuno Rodrigues, what doctors want is to have “working conditions so that they can be calm in their workplaces and give their best for the Portuguese people” and, if this is possible, “naturally there won’t be these demands”.
Asked whether the emergence of inorganic movements, such as “Médicos em Luta” (Doctors in Struggle), could take strength away from the unions, he said that it was a form of “protest and public demonstration of dissatisfaction”.
“Before we reached an agreement [with the government] there were 18 long months of negotiation, often fruitless, and naturally colleagues often have exacerbated reactions to the ineffectiveness they see. For our part, we think it was really just a protest movement and a public demonstration of dissatisfaction.”
Pointing out that “everyone has the right to protest and everyone has the right to demand”, Nuno Rodrigues argued that in this case it is the unions that have the power to negotiate and therefore represent the doctors before the Ministry of Health.
